From the "Our President is Clueless" File

Riding Out the Crisis

Riding Out the Crisis


News that President Bush was out biking Wednesday during the red alert left Washington residents wondering: Can I skip out of work on a weekday afternoon to ride my bike? And if I do, might I see the president tooling around on a trail somewhere, an army of Secret Service agents frantically trying to protect him from traffic?

Turns out the Secret Service had it relatively easy Wednesday: Bush bikes in a private section of the Patuxent Wildlife Research Reserve in Maryland normally open to researchers and closed to the public, a reserve source tells The Post's Hanna Rosin.

While we're on the topic of Bush's leisure time, anyone intent on criticizing the president for taking an hour and a half out of his day to mountain-bike should take the following as proof that he is indeed a busy man: In a photo taken just after the ride, Bush is holding what appears to be a copy of "I Am Charlotte Simmons," the Tom Wolfe novel about debauchery on a college campus. In early February, Bush told reporters he was reading that same book -- which, if he is almost done, averages to about seven pages a day.

I think this confirms that George W Bush is incidental to the running of his administration. Is it conceiveable that the President of the United States, Post 9-11, would remain uninformed about a potential deadly terrorist threat, unless it is widely accepted by his people that he is useless and best kept out of the way?

BTW, I do respect the fact that he is slugging through a novel at the rate of 7 pages a day. I respect the fact that he is learning to read.